UNDER CONSTRUCTION — The exhibition archive is to give international visibility and accessibility to East European art events, and to enable cross-national research and comparisons. With the collaboration of international experts essential data of exhibitions and event series of key importance are collected and contextualized.

Opening at Luzhniki Stadium. Captions: (top) the guests liked Moscow’s ice-cream from the first day; (bottom) the Norwegians are easy to spot by their knit caps. Photos: Igor Palmin (courtesy of Igor Palmin).

Muscial concert at the Central House of Workers in the Arts (TsDRI). Captions (clockwise from left): American folk singers Peggy Seeger and Guy Carawan; Jeff Ellison presenting his quintet; J.E. and his jazz band. Photos: Igor Palmin (courtesy of Igor Palmin).

Public discussing artworks on view in the Italian Hall of the Exhibition of Paintings, Gorky Park. Photo: Igor Palmin (courtesy of Igor Palmin).

Work by French painter Paul Rebeyrolle, “Boy with his Dead Dog,” on view at the festival. Photo: Igor Palmin (courtesy of Igor Palmin)

Organized by: Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and Communist Youth League (Komsomol)

Location: Moscow

The sixth World Festival of Youth and Students took place over two weeks in the summer of 1957, bringing over 30,000 foreign guests to the Soviet capital with the stated goal of promoting peace and friendship. After the isolation of the Stalin years, the Festival played a major role in opening up Soviet society to the West, as Soviet visitors encountered Western consumer goods, jazz music, and modernist art for the first time, and mingled with guests from abroad. For many young artists, the painting exhibitions, coming on the heels of the hugely successful Picasso retrospective at the Pushkin Museum the previous year, were a revelation. Many unofficial and nonconformist artists of the 1960s generation attribute their later bold explorations of modernist idioms to this formative experience.

The photographs presented here were shot by Igor Palmin, a recently-graduated geology student at the time, who had obtained a coveted ticket to the opening festivities at Luzhniki Stadium. He managed to document many of the Festival’s delegations and crowded cultural events, assembling the shots into a handmade annotated album, from which these pages are taken. In the following decades, Palmin would become one of the most prolific documentarians of the Soviet artistic underground as well as a distinguished photographer for such publications as Iskusstvo, Sovetskii khudozhnik, and Sovetskii pisatel. His portraits of unofficial artists in their studios and candid shots of special gatherings convey something of the warmth of underground social life in the last decades of the Soviet Union.